Regret based Robust Solutions for Uncertain Markov Decision Processes

In this paper, we seek robust policies for uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Most robust optimization approaches for these problems have focussed on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value corresponding to the worst realization of the uncertainty. Recent work has propo...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: AHMED, Asrar, VARAKANTHAM, Pradeep Reddy, Adulyasak, Yossiri, Jaillet, Patrick
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1932
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2931/viewcontent/RRMDP_finalversion.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:In this paper, we seek robust policies for uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Most robust optimization approaches for these problems have focussed on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value corresponding to the worst realization of the uncertainty. Recent work has proposed minimax regret as a suitable alternative to the maximin objective for robust optimization. However, existing algorithms for handling minimax regret are restricted to models with uncertainty over rewards only. We provide algorithms that employ sampling to improve across multiple dimensions: (a) Handle uncertainties over both transition and reward models; (b) Dependence of model uncertainties across state, action pairs and decision epochs; (c) Scalability and quality bounds. Finally, to demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our sampling approaches, we provide comparisons against benchmark algorithms on two domains from literature. We also provide a Sample Average Approximation (SAA) analysis to compute a posteriori error bounds.